Seamus Perry

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386 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 31 Aug

Seamus Perry’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Close Readings · Narrative Poems: ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ by Robert Burns and ‘Peter Grimes’ by George Crabbe · 13 May 2026 podcast

The poem occupies an immense footnote that runs over three pages and Burns was very pleased with it.

I look on Tam O'Shanter to be my standard performance in the poetical line, he wrote.

It was his own favourite poem, he said, an essay in the walk of the muses entirely new to me.

Welcome to the latest installment of Close Readings.

In this series, we're exploring the long tradition of narrative verse written in English, poetry which tells a story, of which Burns's Tamashanta must be one of the greatest, a real yarn of a poem.

Except, of course, it's not exactly written in English, but we'll come on to that.

My name is Seamus Perry, and I teach English literature at Balliol College in Oxford, and I'm talking as always to Mark Ford, poet, critic, and professor of English at University College London.

So, Mark, we actually have two poems to discuss today.

Later on, we're going to turn to George Crabb's rather devastating masterpiece, Peter Grimes.

But let us begin with Burns's boozy, diabolic comedy.

And I suppose we should have the opening lines read.

But we decided, didn't we, that we weren't going to read them ourselves.

OK, so let's have the opening 10 or 12 lines.

Okay, so how does Burns start this poem?

This is a jolly, cheerful, sociable scene.

We're talking about two great poems of the Romantic period.

Romanticism, I suppose, is typically associated with solitary genius, wandering around, spotting daffodils.

Burns is very different from that, isn't he?

He is preeminently a poet of sociability.

So Burns is interested in portraying here that moment when people are finishing their work and are heading for the boozer, getting foo, that's to say, full, drunk, and uncoo happy.

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